Sunday, March 31, 2013

UPCOMING EVENT FROM "THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED NYC": Theatre of the Oppressed is a participatory theater method started by Augusto Boal in the early 1970s to explore social and political issues, and is now used worldwide. One technique is for actors to play out a scene of a social problem, and then invite members of the audience, as "spect-actors," to step into scenes and replay them with different choices and endings. In this video from last year, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC does this exercise on HIV and housing / homelessness. I bring this up because the troupe has a cool event coming up on Monday, April 15 at Housing Works Bookstore, again dealing with HIV. Another event in mid-May involves LGBTQ youth. Check out the organization's home page for more information.

BUILDING STORIES: I recently finished reading graphic novelist Chris Ware's Building Stories, a box set of 14 books, fold-outs, pamphlets and other variously formatted components that together tell the stories of the residents of a three-story Chicago apartment building. The perspectives are various: not only the elderly landlady, the bickering couple, and the lonely woman with an amputated leg, but also the building itself and a bee get the spotlight. The focus is on the amputee, and we visit her at various stages of life. You can dip into her and others' stories at any point, depending on which of the 14 publications you start with, and where you go from there. No matter what path you take, the mysteries deepen or resolve in different ways. You can only read a book for the first time once, but I'm eager to reread Building Stories once I've forgotten some of the details, and shake up the order to see how the story resonates differently. A clever double entendre with the title, as you the reader participate in "building" the stories as you go along.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

"STORYSCAPES" IN NEW YORK NEXT MONTH:April 19-21 in New York City, the Tribeca Film Festival presents "Storyscapes," five innovative examples of interactive storytelling at an installation a the Bombay Sapphire
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® House of Imagination. The event celebrates projects that are making smart use of"new technologies and new possibilities for audience participation."

FACING TEAR GAS:Facing Tear Gas is a tumblr bog of the War Resisters League that collects and shares stories of people who've experienced tear gas. The project aims to support the WRL's campaign to ban the export of US-made tear gas, and the militarization of police in our communities. The tumblr doesn't have so many stories, and the most recent one at this point is a couple months old. Still, it's an interesting issue, and the project seems to have many of the same benefits (builds public participation, yields stories that the campaign can use in outreach and press relations), and challenges (hard to attract good and relevant stories) as other similar projects.

FAMILY STORIES: A recent article in the New York Times says that a strong narrative can bind a family together. Researcherscategorized family narratives into three types: ascending (things are getting better and better), descending (the good times are past), and the most healthy type, oscillating (ups and downs).

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Chinua Achebe, the acclaimed Nigerian author who died this week, had a few things to say about telling stories.

In the final paragraph of his most famous novel, "Things Fall Apart" (1958),a British colonial commissioner in Nigeria imagines the book he'll write about how "he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa," and "every day brought him new material." The complex lives of the villagers get reduced to a mere obstacle for colonial progress, in the narrative conception of the commissioner, who has already thought of a title for his book: "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger."

Years ago, I heard Achebe speak, and he cited a proverb he's fond of: "Until the lions tell their ownstory, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." He told the lion's story.

Elsewhere, as quoted in this New York Times obituary, he said, "There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like."

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Here's
an interview I conducted in 1999 with Dr. Kaethe Weingarten about her
work as a postmodern narrative family therapist. Dr. Weingarten is a
clinical psychologist, peace psychologist, family therapist, as well as
an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Harvard Medical
School Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Health
Alliance (CHA). She has been up to a lot since our interview, and
her most recent work focuses on "reasonable hope, chronic illness and
sorrow." For a full bio, see after the interview.

What is narrative therapy and how is it distinct from other models of psychotherapy?I
don’t think anybody has got a lock on narrative; most therapies rely on
narrative to some extent, and most cultures rely on storytelling to
effect healing or changes in people’s lives. Postmodern narrative family
therapy, which is the kind of therapy that I do, is distinguished from
other forms of family therapy practiced within a modernist frame.Family therapy
practiced from a modernist perspective takes an empirical approach to
problems of individuals and families. There’s now a body of literature
that’s been produced over the last 50 years that a competent modernist
family therapist would study and feel that there would be no problem [a
family was] likely to present that [she] wouldn’t have read about or
seen before. She would assume that it was her responsibility to know
something about the causes of a problem and the solutions to that
problem; and [further she] would consider it essential to be able to
diagnose the problem. The therapist sees herself as an expert, and does
what experts do.In
contradistinction, a postmodern family therapist doesn’t have an idea
that the problem is an entity that the family brings into the room.
Rather, she believes that through dialogue, a description of a problem
emerges. That description is considered to be highly fluid, evolving,
changing, changeable. Diagnosis isn’t the point; the point is helping
people participate in the conversation, so that a co-constructed
definition of the problem will evolve through the conversation. The
expertise that a postmodern family therapist is coming into the room
with is expertise in helping people participate in a conversation, and
keeping the conversation going.Tell me more about the “narrative” in “postmodern narrative family therapy.”Postmodern
narrative family therapy was developed by Michael White and David Epston
in Australia and New Zealand, respectively. People who practice a
postmodern narrative family therapy have one basic orienting belief, and
that is that everybody’s life is a story, or is storied, and what gets
people into trouble is when there is a dominant story that is relatively
inflexible for current circumstances, and that relief comes from
developing alternative stories. Often the alternative stories have
elements in them [that] are marginalized or subjugated, and it requires
deconstruction of the dominant narrative in order to free up enough
collective space in a family for an alternative story to develop.

There
is a view that stories are always a contrivance, that they make meaning
out of essentially random events. Is there such a thing as a “natural”
narrative that emerges in postmodern narrative family therapy, as
opposed to a constructed narrative?My position would
be that all narratives are co-constructed through the process of
conversation. If a different group of people were present, a different
narrative would emerge. At the same time, I do think that there are
constraints on how varied the narrative can be. So I’d probably take a
more moderate position on that.Are you as the therapist the co-constructor of these narratives?Absolutely.
There’s a wonderful phrase, “every question is fateful.” You can’t ask a
question without it having profound effects. As a therapist, primarily
what I do is listen and ask questions, and I would say that my listening
is as fateful as my questioning.What are you listening for in therapy?I’m listening for
content. I’m listening for the process of what’s being communicated, by
whom, through what verbal and non-verbal means, at what pacing, with
what rhythm. I’m listening for inconsistencies across content and
process. I’m listening carefully when language stops or is difficult to
access. There are times when people have a lot of difficulty finding
language for their experience. I’m particularly interested in those
moments, because [often they are] very fruitful places for newness to
emerge. I’m listening for silences, I’m listening for absences, for
what’s not being said. I’m listening for silence as punctuation, not as a
gap, but as a full, meaningful, shaped moment in a conversation.You’ve written a lot about mothers. What are some dominant cultural narratives about mothers and their children?That’s been the
subject of my research for the last decade, so I could certainly talk
about that for a couple of days. I think the primary cultural narrative
about mothers is the splitting of mothers into good and bad, and
mothering practices into good and bad. I think that’s virtually
universal, and it’s invariably pernicious. Mothers tend to internalize
that judgmental view, and begin to code their own behavior [and]
feelings as good or bad, as opposed to on a very broad spectrum—or, more
importantly, as context-dependent. Another dominant discourse is around
maternal selflessness, which affects a narrow band worldwide of
mothers, but with very pernicious affects. The idea that a mother needs
to encourage the development of the child’s self, and that when the
needs of the child and the needs of the mother conflict, that a good
mother is selfless.In your book TheMother’s Voice
you talked about “radical listening,” and said that listening to
mothers would help effect social change. What’s radical about radical
listening?To be listened to
carefully is an incredibly unusual experience; that in and of itself is
political, and therefore radical, [in the sense of] “from the root.” In
the book, I’m really talking about children listening carefully to
their mothers—and not because mothers were imposing on them, which is
something that I have tremendous concerns about. But assuming that the
context were appropriate and it would not be burdensome for a child, I
think that it’s radical because it promotes a mutuality that’s generally
not experienced by people. And so if in the crucible of the family,
young people are exposed to relationships of mutuality, what could be
more radical for society than having its young people emerge into public
life capable of genuine mutuality?About Kaethe Weingarten. Kaethe
Weingarten, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, peace psychologist and
family therapist who is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in
the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Health
Alliance (CHA). She is founder and director of The Witnessing Project,
a nonprofit organization that consults to individuals, families, and
communities locally, nationally, and internationally to transform
passive witnessing of violence and violation into effective action. Dr.
Weingarten was a faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge
from 1982 until it closed in 2009 and it is there that she founded and
directed the Program in Families, Trauma and Resilience. Dr. Weingarten
has worked in Kosovo and South Africa for the last several years,
addressing issues of community-wide and continuous trauma. In 2002 she
was given the award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Theory and
Practice by the American Family Therapy Academy. She has over 90
publications, including six books, and her most recent book, Common Shock --Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal,
won the 2004 Nautilus Award for Social Change. In 2009, she was a
Fulbright Specialist Scholar to New Zealand. Dr. Weingarten lectures
widely nationally and internationally and maintains a private
consultation practice of individuals, couples and families. Her current
work focuses on reasonable hope, chronic illness and sorrow.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

JFK FROM START TO FINISH: I'm from Brookline, Massachusetts, the birthplace of John F. Kennedy, and home to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, located in the little house where he grew up. I was recently in Dallas, where I visited the Sixth Floor Museum, which documents JFK's assassination, and is located in the book depository where Lee Harvey Oswald took the fatal shots. Both sites make ample use of the recorded voices of people who knew JFK. At the birthplace, a recording of family matriarch Rose Kennedy narrates the goings-on in each room of the house, like the kitchen where little future presidentwould eat cookies! At the Sixth Floor Museum, recordings of witnesses to JFK's assassination spoke of their perspective. I found the use of audio more affecting than video is or would be at either of the sites, as it more readily allowed me to project past events onto the present-day scene.

"NARRATIVES OF THE 99%" EVENT THIS WEEK AT CUNY GRADUATE CENTER: This Thursday at 6:00pm at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, an event on "Storytelling and Occupy." As described on the event page: "Telling personal stories can empower storytellers, build community, and move groups to action. In the second year of Occupy Wall Street, how has storytelling moved from the encampments and assemblies to the various campaigns for housing, health care, and debt resistance, among others? What challenges do we face when documenting and archiving people’s personal stories? Join movement organizers from groups in and beyond OWS for a conversation about storytelling as tool for transformation."

About Me

NOTE: PLEASE VISIT www.workingnarratives.org for weekly blog posts on storytelling and social change. "Inside Stories" is only updated very rarely now, but please read the archives for posts on the many forms of storytelling -- from journalism to genealogy to psychology to film to literature to walking tours and more. Also check out the podcast archive! You can email me at paulvdc [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks for visiting!